Azure Elastic SAN expanding Enterprise Storage Capabilities

Since launching our preview, many enterprise customers validated their workloads on To serve even more workloads, we are excited to introduce performance improvements, and various security enhancements, while making Elastic SAN even easier to use and manage as your enterprise block storage. Plus, we added an entirely new integration with Azure VMware Solution!

Azure Elastic SAN is the industry’s first fully managed storage area network (SAN) offering in the cloud. Combining on-premises SAN-like capabilities with the benefits of being a cloud-native service, it offers a scalable, cost-effective, high-performance, and reliable storage solution for your needs – regardless of whether you are migrating your on-premises SAN to the cloud or creating a new application in the cloud and need a storage solution that can serve a variety of compute options.

New: Enterprise Storage Capabilities

To provide enterprise grade storage support, we are releasing several new features that let you confidently run even your most critical workloads on Elastic SAN.

Enhanced Security

Data security is another top priority for production workloads, so we added more ways to help you control which clients can access your volumes, and which applications can consume your data.

After the recent addition of private endpoint support, we expanded our network security by supporting the PublicNetworkAccess property. This property controls if your Elastic SAN allows access from public networks. When this setting is disabled, only Private Link requests are allowed, and all other requests (including VNet) are denied. This allows you to enforce only connecting through private endpoints at the SAN level, preventing any accidental misconfiguration at the volume group level from exposing your data to the wrong VNets (Elastic SAN denies public access by default).

While you already benefit from Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with platform-managed keys (which is enabled by default for Azure Elastic SAN), we also added support for Server-Side Encryption with Customer Managed Keys (SSE with CMK). SSE with CMK improves Server-Side Encryption by giving you control of the encryption keys, to meet your compliance needs. SSE with CMK is integrated with Azure Key Vault, which provides highly available and scalable secure storage for your keys.

Increased Performance and Scale

To empower you to achieve more, we improved performance and increased the scale you can achieve with Elastic SAN, without any changes to the price of the product. We have increased the throughput limit for the SAN-level Base Unit, thereby increasing the total SAN throughput limit. The volume IOPS and throughput limits were also increased by 25%. These improvements make Elastic SAN an even better fit for larger DB deployments like SQL that require IOPS and/or throughput.

Additionally, we have further reduced read and write latency, meaning you will see approximately 25% faster I/O responses than you saw previously, to address the needs of latency sensitive workloads like PostgreSQL, MySQL, and others. And since you can now create up to 100 volume groups in one Elastic SAN, you can consolidate more of those types of workloads in a single deployment.

Management Improvements

We also added two enhancements in service management: force delete and live volume resizing. Force delete allows you to delete your Elastic SAN volumes even if they are actively connected to a compute resource. Similarly, live volume resizing lets you size up your volumes on the fly, without needing to detach your volumes. You can add more storage and performance – without downtime and with less time spent on management overhead.

Now in Preview: Azure VMware Solution Integration

Today, we are announcing Elastic SAN as a VMware Certified datastore for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) at VMware Explore in Barcelona. This all-new preview integration lets you expand your AVS storage capacity without having to add more nodes, by exposing Elastic SAN as an external datastore to your AVS cluster.

With Elastic SAN, you can scale your storage in 1 TiB increments independently from your Compute resources to get the lowest total cost of ownership and highest scale. For example, if you want to prepare for a disaster recovery scenario, you may not need the runtime performance at standby, but you do need extra storage capacity for data replication. With Elastic SAN, you can provision additional storage for as little as 6 to 8 cents per GiB per month¹, saving you significantly on your monthly bill.

You will be able to deploy an Elastic SAN datastore through the Azure Portal, and as a first party service, it provides a native Azure Storage experience that comes with a tighter integration with other native Azure products. If you are interested in testing this integration, sign up through this preview form.

Getting Started Today

You can deploy an Elastic SAN² by following our instructions on how to get started or refer to our documentation to learn more about these new features. If you are looking for a way to migrate your on-premises SAN to Azure Elastic SAN (or any other Azure block storage offering), you can use the Azure-Sponsored (free!) migration tool by Cirrus Data Solutions, which you can find in the Azure Marketplace.

If you have any questions or feedback about Azure Elastic SAN, you can email us at [email protected].

¹ Based on East US pricing. Please confirm pricing for your region using the pricing calculator.
² Not available in all regions. For a list of available regions please refer to our documentation.